Category: Best Korea

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Force Assessment

“That way management can assess who’s valuable and who’s expendable.  It’s just business.” – American Beauty

There’s a new urban reality show where judges free inmates who like fishing, called “Off the Hook”.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  6. Open War.

Volume VIII, Issue 4

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., but given the lower numbers on the indexes and the lower number of violence and censorship events, will likely lower the level next month if violence stays low.  Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Chinese Assessment, Civil War 2.0  – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 920 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Chinese Assessment, Civil War 2.0 

This is a longer piece.  Obviously, I don’t have a friend in the PLA’s Institute of War Studies who sent this to me (THANK YOU SO MUCH CHANG!) but I do have a large number of readers from the People’s Republic of China, so here’s a shout out to you guys!

Part of being in the United States is that we’re invested in the outcome of a potential future Civil War in a big way.  The Chinese?  They’re interested.  So, I tried to come up with what a somewhat neutral third party would say about Civil War 2.0.  I do know this about militaries, they have plans for everything, so I know that China has a document based on a future American Civil War, so I thought, Wilder, what if you wrote one from China’s perspective?  Here’s my attempt.  It’s dry.  Only one joke.

People’s Liberation Army
Institute of War Studies
For:  General Staff/Theater Strategic Research Cell
INTERNAL DRAFT – NOT FOR RELEASE

Subject:  Possible forms of large-scale internal armed conflict in the United States; relative combat potential; implications for our strategy
Character:  Contingency estimate and outcome review.  This is not a strategic directive.
Constraints:  No actual names of U.S. persons.  No executable strike list against the U.S. homeland.

  1. Mission and Purpose of the Estimate

This estimate reviews four questions:

  1. If the United States enters a large internal conflict between an inland nationalist, armed civil-society coalition and an urban–institutional–transnational coalition, what is the balance of war potential?
  2. On what time scale could the conflict unfold, and how cities and logistics could fail?
  3. How would outside states recognize, hedge, or feed both sides?
  4. What window and what risk does this create for our main strategic direction: Taiwan, the Western Pacific, energy and grain routes, and dollar clearing?

An American internal war is not two field armies advancing on a front, instead it is the splitting of a state machine.  From our viewpoint, the decisive prizes are fragments of nuclear command authority, which government foreign nations will still treat as a government that can sign contracts and that can keep ports and bulk food moving.  A rapid national reunification by either coalition is usually worse for us than a long dual-authority stalemate that cripples external power projection.

  1. Situation and planning assumptions

Assumption A.  The trigger is domestic:  a disputed transfer of power, a federal–state armed standoff, a nationwide attempt to confiscate arms or starve ammunition supply that states refuse, or a systematic civil-liberties crackdown that produces organized nullification.

Assumption B.  The active-duty force does not split cleanly along electoral maps.  State National Guard, some reserve components, veterans, and local law enforcement will show regional tilt.

Assumption C.  In the opening period, intercity trucking and regional electric service are interrupted for days and possibly weeks.  This follows from just-in-time urban design and capitalist logistics.  It does not require a precision sabotage campaign to create failure.

Assumption D.  We do not seek American territory. The task is window management, risk hedging, and competitive shaping.

The United States has on the order of 340 million people. Partisan identification is close. Cities hold population and a majority of output. The interior holds land, calories, and most onshore hydrocarbons. That is the base conflict map.

  1. Identification of the Two Coalitions
Label Center of Gravity Geographic Weight
Red Force, the state-rights /traditional Americans Rural and small-town population, a majority of veterans by affiliation, higher personal firearms density, many state executives and county law officers in the interior Heartland, Plains, Mountain West, much of the South and Appalachia, growing Sun Belt interiors
Blue Force, urban/ institutional/ globalist Dense metros, universities, much of media, ports, hospitals, finance, a large share of the federal civilian apparatus Coastal and Great Lakes cores, a few deep-blue states, the diplomatic and dollar-clearing nodes

 

  1. Relative Combat Potential

4.1 Numbers

Blue Force has the larger share of people and of high-value economic output in compact space. Red Force has the larger share of land and of counties that produce food and fuel.  Raw headcount favors Blue. Staying power on territory favors Red.

4.2 Age and Manpower Quality

Younger urban cohorts lean toward Blue, especially young women. Older cohorts and a large share of military-age males with weapons experience lean toward Red. Red Force’s core is older. Blue Force’s demographic is younger and has no experience with hardship, especially in field conditions.

4.3 Means

The largest force asymmetry is distributed firearms and veteran skill on the Red side.  This is counterbalanced by the institutional, financial, medical, and information infrastructure on the Blue side.

Personal gun ownership is on the order of twice as common in the general voter on the Red side as in the Blue aligned voters.  A key factor is the he national stock of firearms is measured in the hundreds of millions.  However, active-duty United States military services remain the only formation that can move at continental scale with aviation, logistics, and nuclear custody.  Their loyalty is the war’s hinge but it is not sure that they will follow either coalition.

4.4 Cohesion

Red Force coheres around land, faith networks, veterans’ organizations, and distrust of coastal institutions.  It fractures around personalities and between libertarian, populist, and traditional-conservative currents.

Blue Force coheres through bureaucracies, universities, city governments, and remaining national media.  It fractures among socialists, corporate liberals, and identity factions the moment scarcity arrives.

4.5 Command

No single chain exists at the start.

  • Governors command Guard forces until a federalization fight is won or lost.
  • Active-duty officers swear to a constitution, not a faction.
  • Blue Force has more practice running large organizations and talking to foreign ministries.
  • Red Force has more small-unit and land skill and more of the interior’s elected law officers.

Expected command picture:  federated, messy, multiple “capitals,” local strongmen.

4.6 Public Order

Urbanization predicts recorded violent crime better than party label. Dense Blue cores will face faster public-order failure when lights and food stop.  Rural Red areas will face their own disorder:  freelancers, score-settling, and local bosses.  Neither coalition is “the professional army” and neither is “the mob.” Both will generate both, though Red coordination structures are likely more resilient to the certain outages of power and information and less prone to the civil violence commonly seen among blacks.

  1. Environment: terrain, logistics, systems

5.1 Terrain

Continental distances, the Rockies, the Appalachians, the Mississippi system, deserts, and northern winter all punish long supply lines.  The countryside is hard to occupy.  The city is impossible to live in without electricity and trucks.

5.2 Food and fuel

California leads agricultural production on a per dollar basis, but most food (grain, oilseeds, cattle, hogs) is produced in the Midwest and in the Plains.  Metros run on continuous inbound trucks.  Retail inventories of food in large cities are measured in days.  Western and southwestern cities are more exposed to food-supply shock than Midwestern and northeastern cities.

Onshore oil and gas are concentrated in Texas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Wyoming, and similar interior producers.  Coastal Blue states are large consumers and are generally net energy importers.

5.3 Power

The bulk power system consists of three grids Eastern, Western, ERCOT.  Texas is nearly an electrical island.  Peak imports into California have already been source of unreliably during long durations of elevated temperatures.  Urban counties show higher outage burden than rural counties in recent published studies.  When bulk power fails, water pumps, sewage, hospitals, elevators, and card payments fail behind it.

5.4 Chokepoints of national significance

Interstate junctions, rail hubs, river locks, pipelines, a small number of container ports, and a small number of food-distribution counties. Blue Force lives at the receiving end of these systems. Red Force lives nearer many of the producing nodes.

  1. Urban System Under Multi-Day to Multi-Week Loss of Power and Food Shipments

Planning assumption: inbound freight and bulk power are unreliable for days and possibly weeks. This is enough to break modern metros.

“Collapse” means loss of municipal control and mass uninhabitability.

“Hold” means some authority, a port or river, nearby production, or milder climate keeps a fraction of the population in place.

6.1 Blue-aligned cores most likely to collapse first

  • Desert metros (Las Vegas type; Phoenix type).  No local water or calories at metro scale.
  • Hyper-dense coastal islands (New York type).  Four to five days of point-of-sale food in official city studies; extensive use of bridges and tunnels; and apartments that need electricity for water.
  • Inner Bay Area type.  Peninsula geography, little staple production, dependence on Central Valley corridors and imported peak power.
  • Los Angeles basin type.  Conditionally fragile.  Nearby valleys can feed it only if corridors and pumps still work.  Population scale and imported water make simultaneous failure catastrophic.
  • South Florida strip type.  Peninsula, heat, storms, imported food.
  • Boston or New England type.  Winter energy tightness and thin local staples.
  • Federal district core.  Political value high, local calories near zero. Survival depends on neighboring state authorities.
  • Hawaii. On the order of nine-tenths of food imported. Sealift and air cargo stop, stores empty in days.

6.2  Blue-aligned cores that may hold

  • Chicago type. The country’s central food and freight node beside Illinois–Iowa production.  Lake water still needs treatment and pumps. If farms still sell into the city, it lasts. If the farms withhold, it becomes New York.
  • Twin Cities type. Grain and protein nearby; winter without gasoline is the killer.
  • Sacramento type. Sits in the Valley rather than at the end of a long hose.
  • Willamette/Portland type. Actual nearby mixed farming.
  • San Diego type. Naval and port footprint; milder climate than desert metros; survival rises if naval authority keeps the harbor working and Los Angeles out.
  • Philadelphia–Baltimore type. Mid-Atlantic farms and ports; less isolated than Manhattan, yet in the midst of collapse already.
  • Great Lakes rust-belt cores. Poor social baseline, better food geography than the Southwest.
  • Atlanta type and other blue city halls inside mixed or red states. Resilience is political: the surrounding state may provision the tax base or quarantine the enclave.
  • Front Range type. Some nearby production; long truck bridge; water is the weakness.

None of these are self-sufficient if the regional truck and grid system is actually down. A collapsed city is not automatically captured by Red Force, it may simply cease to be a city.

  1. Victory Objectives

Neither coalition can cheaply occupy the other’s core terrain.

A Red Force win looks like: enough territory and calories to deny Blue a working national government; surviving state machines; a settlement, partition, or “restored constitution” that Red Force recognizes.  Occupying hostile coastal megacities would consume Red Force.

A Blue Force win looks like: retention of federal forms, the dollar, ports, and foreign recognition; isolation of interior resistance.  Occupying the interior against a dispersed armed population would consume Blue Force.

Most likely military-political outcome: multiple authorities, a humanitarian disaster, a poorer and less sovereign United States.

  1. External Actors

Outside countries will not “join a side” as in a treaty war.  They will protect their interests and choose to deal with the winner that best serves their national interests.

8.1 China’s Preferred Outcome

A United States that can no longer concentrate power in the Western Pacific, while still buying our goods and servicing dollar assets until a substitute currency system is in place.

  • A fast Red Faction victory is dangerous if the survivor is coherent, energy-rich, hostile over Taiwan and technology, and still willing to use export controls and naval power.  It is less dangerous if that survivor withdraws from Asia.
  • A fast Blue Faction victory is dangerous if it restores a working Pentagon, alliances, and export-control regimes and insists on maintaining its cultural hegemony.
  • A long stalemate is the best of the bad outcomes:  while markets seize, naval fleets argue over which orders are legitimate.  During this period, Taiwan is isolated and external military force projection become impossible for the United States.

Therefore, the rational course for China is dual-track:  public language of stability and non-interference.  But we will fund either side with covert information, finance, and selected commodities to prevent a short decisive win.  We engage in recognition of whoever holds the UN seat, but will continue to provide enough life support to the other fragment to keep the split active.  We buy soy, pork, and energy from the interior and sell finished goods into coastal metros.

A famine that kills our suppliers and a coastal crash that kills our consumers are both to be avoided.  The best condition would be a managed paralysis.

8.2  Goals of Countries Hostile to the United States

Russia/Iran/Best Korea:  Aligned with China in wanting a weaker United States, and longer term Russia has designs on Alaska.

8.3 Neighbors of the United States

Mexico will prefer a Blue Force victory due to a need for an outlet for their excess population and as a source of funding.

Canada is more tightly bound to the United States since they are wired into the electrical grid, and export automobiles, grain and energy.  A non-functional United States is an existential Canadian problem, though a potential Chinese foothold on the continent.

8.4 U.S. allies

Pacific:  Japan, ROK, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand

They ask one question:  is there still a navy and a nuclear deterrent that will appear in the Pacific?  They will follow continuing command authority.  Their only win is for Red Force to win decisively and keep the fleet intact.  A Blue Force that holds ports but loses interior fuel and manpower looks will provide no support.  They have little ability to influence the events of a civil war in the United States.

European Union and the United Kingdom.

There is a cultural affinity with Blue Force.  They are in terror of Red Force abandoning NATO; and feel equal terror of a collapsed America.  They have little ability to influence the events of a civil war in the United States.

  1. Wild Cards
    Urban gangs and border cartels.
    Winter, hurricanes, western fire and drought.
    Nuclear and strategic-asset custody.
    Dollar collapse.
    A disease event on top of disorder.
  2. Implications for Our Strategy

10.1 The window

A United States arguing over which fragment owns the Pacific fleet is a United States that cannot run a two-theater war.  That is the operational meaning of this contingency for the first island chain.  As cracks open, we should have plans in place to take advantage of the advantage this will give us.

10.2 Risks to us

  • Financial contagion that destroys our reserve portfolio and export demand.
  • Loss of U.S. soy, pork, and energy shipments if interior authorities stop exporting or if ports freeze.
  • A surviving American fragment that is poorer, angrier, less legally constrained, and considering expansion.
  • Allied emergency coordination that freezes the map against us (United States bases stay manned by European allies).  This is unlikely.

10.3 Recommended posture for study

  1. Treat prolonged dual authority as the outcome to shape toward.
  2. Prepare recognition and trade channels for more than one U.S. fragment (ports, grain houses, energy terminals) without early exclusive commitment unless that commitment comes with extraordinary opportunity.
  3. Insulation of our own grain, energy, and payment exposure to a dollar seizure or a Gulf–Pacific simultaneous crisis.  Continue to build stockpiles of critical minerals and commodities.
  1. Estimate in One Paragraph

Red Force is stronger in distributed arms, veterans, land, food, and hydrocarbons.

Blue Force is stronger in people, money, ports, formal institutions, and the existing alliance-and-dollar network.

Neither can cheaply occupy the other’s core.  Desert and hyper-dense coastal Blue metros fail first when power and trucks stop.  Blue Midwest lake-and-rail metros fail later.

Outside powers will not crown a winner if they are thinking clearly.  Our interest is a United States that cannot concentrate, not a United States that has been replaced by a single hostile survivor.

Violence and Censorship:

War was declared on Spain, yet they’re not fighting back:

Ireland . . . excellent!

England, however, hates itself and is censoring it’s national symbol:

Never forget, the GloboLeftElite hates you.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery.

But all those data center jobs?

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are way down.  Too hot for all that?

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down again this month to a near-record low.

Economic:

The economy ticked up slightly last month but I’m concerned.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started, but remember who they are.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month.  Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/the-dsa-is-using-coffee-with-comrades-and-socialist-softball-to-convert-the-curious-ffcbcc65
https://nypost.com/2026/08/15/us-news/socialist-ny-lawmaker-emily-gallagher-says-shoplifters-have-a-biological-need-to-steal/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/democratic-socialists-openly-call-erasure-constitutional-government
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/inflection-point-arrives-dsas-unofficial-america-hating-communist-mascot
https://twitter.com/i/status/2042031825887936702
https://modernity.news/2026/09/05/copycat-clancy-horror/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/08/09/mexican-influencers-murdered-live-streams/

GOOD GUYS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYSaeU5qC70
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2096564604646068341

ONE GUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpWxamM96bg&t=31s
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/08/26/trans-protestor-has-self-defense-hearing-over-drawing-gun-in-laramie-street/

BODY COUNT

https://www.dailymail.com/health/article-16044311/massachusetts-governor-maura-healey-abortion-law.html
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-how-the-american-population-map-will-shift-by-2050/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2026-08-12_09-25-50.png?itok=Ogu-3AuJ
https://archive.ph/LaP2e

VOTE COUNT

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XgSnP_KD_CU
https://www.michigannewssource.com/2026/08/michigan-sheriff-receives-whistleblower-allegation-state-software-automatically-registering-noncitizens-to-vote/
https://www.themidwesterner.news/2026/08/citizen-only-voting-initiative-faces-monday-canvassers-vote-after-staff-recommends-rejecting-petition/
https://ballotpedia.org/When_states_can_begin_processing_and_counting_absentee/mail-in_ballots,_2022

CIVIL WAR

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1984801376
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/a-second-civil-war-and-the-country-fractured-in-two-thats-the-imagined-future-in-author-kurt-andersens-new-novel-xexbrf/
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/30/socialists-fight-aoc-2028
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/gop-plot-to-sabotage-jd-vance-2028-prospects
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/style/america-is-atomizing.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4VA.1iQ7.eLCo7EZHLM8d&smid=url-share
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/socialist-leader-says-quiet-part-out-loud-affordability-pitch-masks-guerrilla-class-war
https://modernity.news/2026/08/09/uk-intelligence-warns-of-civil-war-plot-against-migrants-convenient-demonisation/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackout-power-electricity-outage.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6VA.oPoZ.in0JSEQwfHWI&smid=url-share

If You Can’t Spot The Sucker At The Table . . . .

“No, this sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.” – Back to the Future Ouch, I guess eclipse jokes can be dark. I’ve heard the phrase “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker,” … Continue reading “If You Can’t Spot The Sucker At The Table . . . .”

“No, this sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.” – Back to the Future

Ouch, I guess eclipse jokes can be dark.

I’ve heard the phrase “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker,” many times in my life.

Mostly, after I’ve realized I was the sucker.

Recently, I’ve been watching the markets the same way I watch a late-night poker game at a kitchen table. The cards are the same for everyone. The rules are printed right there. And yet, somehow, the same faces keep walking away with the chips.

Let’s start with three recent examples that should make people who actually save, invest, and try to play by the rules say . . . huh.

Is 2,000 pounds of Korean money a Won ton?

Let’s start with South Korea’s leveraged massacre, 2026 edition.

Normal guys in South Korea were betting on the right side of the trade. I mean, they were on the right side of the trade before the South Korean market began hemorrhaging cash this week as China starts to look pretty strong in the chip-making business. But before that massacre, retail traders (they call them “ants”) piled into brand-new single-stock 2x leveraged ETFs tied to Samsung™ and other Korean tech firms who were benefiting from the A.I. bubble.

The bet is simple. If Samsung© goes up 10%, your ETF goes up 20%. Get on the right side of the trade, and double the profits that all of the suckers are making.

By law, the products rebalance every single day by a public formula: sell more when the stock drops, buy more when it rises. Sophisticated trading desks know the formula, know the size of the flows, and know when they hit: near the market close. These firms essentially buy the stock beforehand, and scalp the 2x part of the trade.

But if the stock declines, the automated selling amplifies the decline. Hundreds of thousands of accounts of small guys saw their accounts evaporate. The “little guys” who thought they were investors discovered they were only “market liquidity” that got liquidated. I imagine it’s even worse this week as their market is imploding.

I wonder after the first tsunami hit Japan if they had lots of different names for it, you know, a title wave.

Let’s move next to the microsecond arms race.

Investment firms pay serious money to put their servers inside the same data center as the exchange matching engines. Why? The firms can see slower orders coming, cancel their quotes, reprice, or step in front. They legally front-run purchases, getting a bit of the action, like me getting in the cheeseburger line in front of Rosie O’Donnell, buying all the burgers, and then making her pay twice the price to me because you know she wants one.

But instead of burgers, my pension and my 401k are the funding source and the burgers. Or they buy the burgers. I forget. Just thinking about Rosie eating is unsettling.

I once installed a trampoline on Aerosmith’s tour bus. Now everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.

Next? A.I. bets: Pensions and 401ks are literally soaking in it.

Nobody actually requires pension funds to buy speculative A.I. bets. But when the benchmark rate that the fund is trying to replicate is the S&P 500©, over half of that index is now A.I. Private credit and datacenter infrastructure funds are sold as “diversifiers.” The Aptly Named Larry Fink has been open about it and I’ve written about him before: a big chunk of the A.I. build-out is coming from “your savings accounts and pension accounts.”

If, or more likely when, the power plants never get built or the market discovers that no one really wants to pay a lot for A.I., the little guys eat it. We’ve seen this movie with mortgage-backed securities in 2008, but after 20 years, who isn’t up for a sequel? And don’t mention Star Wars®.

Those three are current “legal” scams.

There are larger, longer-running and still legal versions that hit responsible investors. Here are a few.

Steal a man’s wallet and he’ll be broke for a day. Teach him to play drums and he’ll be broke for the rest of his life.

Payment for order flow.
My “commission-free” IRA firm sells my orders to the big market makers.

They see the flow first. Every time I click “buy,” someone is being paid to take the other side with better data than I will ever have.

Index and ETF reconstitution.
The rules for what goes into the big indexes are public. Active money buys the adds and sells the deletes before the passive funds are forced to do it on the effective date. If you own index funds (and most of us do, in 401ks and IRAs), you are systematically buying high and selling low on the reconstitution days. The front-runners collect the spread.

Private-equity leveraged buyouts.
A PE firm buys a solvent company, and loads it with debt. This is what happened to Toys’r’Us©. And Sears™. And RadioShack©. And TWA®.

And I could keep going.

They then extract fees and dividends, cut costs, and exit leaving like a vampire leaves a dried husk before the Sun comes up. The workers get fired. The store sits empty, as what was once a business becomes a blight. If my pension was invested in those funds, I’m also funding the vampire extraction while the downside lands on the real economy.

Glass coffins? Schrödinger was not a fan.

Institutional money vacuuming up single-family homes.
Large capital pools decided residential real estate was an asset class. They bought the inventory that used to go to . . . families. Prices and rents rise. I already owned, so I was insulated. But the kids?

Too-big-to-fail.
When the “systemically important” institutions get into trouble, they will be bailed out. I’m betting that OpenAI™ is working to get as big as it can as soon as it can so it can sink its tentacles into the economy deep enough that if it fails it brings the whole house down and then they will have to bail Sam Altman out so he can keep his mansions, cars, and bunker. Hey, I guess it’s just a business model.

Even though he won, he could tell there was no future in it.

I guess I can stop pretending the game is neutral, because I could go on and on and on with more examples. To the big players, the Elons, Altmans, the Finks, we’re just liquidity and our retirement account is being used as their stack of chips.

The cards are the same.

The edge is not.

Don’t be the sucker.

SpaceX®: The Final Frontier?

“Time to musk up.” – Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy

You know who gives kids a bad name?  Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has just launched his SpaceX® IPO at a price of $135.  If you were in on the initial purchase, you’ve already printed money, as the current price is now at $216 as I write this.  This is bitcoin level price increase.  And, it shows Elon Musk’s meme effect.  I expect soon enough that he’ll announce he’s moved his headquarters to an orbital space bombardment platform.

For tax reasons, you know.

As much as the GloboLeftists like to make fun of Elon for buying Twitter© and turning it into X© and destroying 30% of its market value, Musk has certainly had the better of that conversation since he’s now a trillionaire and his having an amplified voice on X© certainly hasn’t hurt.

Regardless:  quatro commas.

That’s a lot of money.

Step 2:  Profit.  Step 1:  Time Machine.

As I write this, SpaceX© has a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion dollars.  That’s more than Amazon©.  It’s more than Saudi Aramco®.  There are only four stocks bigger than SpaceX©: Apple®, Nvidia™, Google©, and Microsoft© and I think it passed Microsoft® this afternoon.  And, in the scheme of things, it’s pretty close to being the biggest company.

Ever.

To put this into perspective, SpaceX© by itself is now worth as much money as all the aerospace companies and defense companies in the world.  Combined.

Part of this is due to the relatively small number of SpaceX™ shares available.  SpaceX© sold 5% of itself, getting $85 billion to pay off debt and buy Elon something nice.  If Elon had dumped all of the stock, I’m betting it wouldn’t have near that valuation because someone would have had to buy the other $2.7 trillion worth of shares, and it’s not like Jeff Bezos has that in his couch cushions.

To be fair, no one has that in their couch cushions except the federal government, and they’re too busy giving it to Democrat agitators to bring in foreigners and agitate for communism.  You know, things that benefit society.

The North Korean gymnast didn’t win in the Olympics©, but her execution was flawless.

That small float has led to the stock, in my opinion, being a meme.  It’s the Dogecoin© of equities.  It has enormous value because Elon is associated with it.  It also, unlike the usual IPOs accessible only to folks with a half million bucks or so, is accessible to anyone that can fog a mirror.  Beyond that, it’s also going to be required to be picked up by several stock indices soon.  This will require things like pension funds and mutual funds to buy it.

What is “it”, though?  What makes up SpaceX™?

The smallest piece is actually what people think of:  the rockets.  Even though Musk has the single largest, most active, and most efficient space program on the planet, that’s not a huge market.  I mean, it’s more money than I have, but Elon’s biggest customer is . . . Elon.

Starlink© is the only profitable piece of this project.  My eldest, The Boy, has Starlink©.  He likes it.  It’s good, if you’re not close to an actual wire.  The problem for other people wanting to make a space-based Internet is that Elon has the big lead here, and there’s probably only room for one company.

Jeff Bezos was going to try to make an orbital communications network, but his rockets don’t work, so he has no way to send stuff to space cheaply.  Cheaply?  Speaking of Jeff’s wife . . .

I digress.

I knew Bezos’ rocket program schedule was in trouble when he hired Elton John.  I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.

So, what else is SpaceX©?  It’s the X™ formerly known as Twitter©.  Which seems an odd pairing with the other two, but not as strange as the last piece:  xAI®.

In summary, SpaceX© is:

Rockets:  Total market?  $370 billion.  Not sure if that includes the Iranian market.  As it is, he’s showing a $662 million loss in the rocket segment in 1Q26, but that includes blowing up all of those Starship™ tests.  If NASA were doing the same thing, it would have already cost a trillion dollars and they wouldn’t have launched the first one yet.

If some of SpaceX® junk destroys a city in north Texas, would the headline be “Debris does Dallas”? (as-found)

Space connections:  Total market?  $1.6 trillion.  Elon can probably earn most of this and it’s already earning him over a billion dollars a year.  As the Internet is primarily made of porn and cat videos, made $1.1 billion last quarter selling virtual pussy . . . cats.

The old Twitter™:  No known profit.  By transferring the old Twitter® to SpaceX™ that does make Elon the X® owner.

AI:  $26.5 trillion.  Right now, he’s losing only $2.5 billion a quarter at this, which makes him a rank amateur when compared with OpenAI®.  OpenAI© lost $38.5 billion last year, so Musk needs to lose a lot more money this year to catch up.

One of these is not like the other.  And I’d argue that one of these isn’t remotely reasonable.

You can do your own math.  But the big thing to me is this is quite like Elon Musk’s junk drawer that has a flashlight and an old 9-volt battery and some slightly-dull colored pencils and an old AC adaptor that I’ve forgotten exactly what it adapted.  Starlink™ and the rockets make sense together.  But xAI®?  Was that just thrown in there to puff up the price?

It was.  And maybe sometime in the future he’ll toss Tesla© and Grimes and some old socks in there, too.

See!  I didn’t make this up.  It takes accountants to make things up. (as-found)

The big connection there would be that, I guess, that Elon can make orbital data centers that don’t require power generation on Earth or cooling water.  And Elon’s only going to build (checks notes) a million of them.  That’s pretty ambitious since he’s only tossed up 10,000 Starlink© satellites at about $2 million each.  If he got the same price (doubtful) it would still cost $2 trillion.  Probably closer to $20 trillion.

Which is . . . not going to happen.  In fact, I think the SpaceX™ IPO will be looked back as the point where the A.I. bubble began to deflate.  But I’ve been wrong before:  I missed some bits and wouldn’t have bet that it would have gone up as fast as it has.

Remember like they said in Apollo 13, failure is always an option. (as-found)

What is the end game, then?

Well, Elon’s end game is to make Elon insanely rich, for one.  To be fair, he’s already gotten insanely rich through selling electric cars and built a space program that exceeds the capacity of every other nation on Earth, and has fathered something like 70 little Musks which might be part of his own diversification strategy:  a genetic junk-drawer, as it were.

What’s the long game?  Maybe an orbital space bombardment platform.  Or a government on Mars peopled entirely by those offspring.

Well, at least now he has space for rent.

This is not advice or a solicitation to buy or sell or rent or trade or loan or barter or whatever other adjective.  It’s a humor post.  I actually hope Elon does send up a million rockets, but I’m thinking it’s more likely he’ll have a million kids, which, with enough investor money is much more possible but I wouldn’t want go on a long car trip with a million kids because I’d be tempted to sell or rent or trade or loan or barter the lowest performing 10% of the children into the PEZ® mines.  Also, I think having a million kids would make me sore.  Which also might be Elon’s plan.  Regardless, this isn’t investment, dating, or reproductive advice.

One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer?  Daystrom was right.  I can do a lot of other things.  Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain?  Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea:  Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek.  My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding.  Yes.  Literally exploding.

Were they sentient?  Sure.  Helpful?  Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks.  The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me.  I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer.  In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people.  The machine went full neurotic.  And turning it off?  It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®.  What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter?  Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős.  The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years.  Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever.  People hadn’t solved this problem.  But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong.  Dead wrong.  This isn’t crunching numbers faster.  This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere.  Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?”  Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet.  But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores.  They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either.  These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas?  You can negotiate with Hamas.  (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything.  However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems.  And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power.  That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average.  So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on?  Simple:  require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore?  What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change.  The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study.  It changed me for the better.  The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point?  I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools.  I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules.  But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator.  A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist.  Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing.  People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world.  Oops, forgot!  They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right:  physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue.  They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby.  Which is what they already are, but at least under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year.  Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots.  They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails.  And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in.  The old model is broken.  Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead.  Silly wife!  They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot:  lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this.  The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops.  It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement:  you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done.  When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude.  And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner.  And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night.  I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome!  I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply.  North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks.  Compliance by force is easy.  Loyalty?  Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside.  That’s not a society.  That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply.  Remember 2020-2021?  It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it.  A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.”  Some complied, without believing.  Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior.  The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor.  COVID was the big opportunity.  Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned.  The goal was simple:  only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast.  The goal was:  brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim.  I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked.  Back then we had a shared set of values.  Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages.  Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures.  Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods.  But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids.  The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced.  Must help.  Must clean it up.  Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders?  Well, punishing it is so mean.  It just needs more care.  That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now.  Who’s crying the loudest today?  Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules?  The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods.  Bob replied, “You’re scared?  I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls.  Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse.  Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear:  your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean.  Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time?  “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on.  The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts.  What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy.  Societies don’t pivot on a dime.  There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture.  Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive.  The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly.  The lies have been lucrative.  But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®?  I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect

“Let’s say this Twinkie™ represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area.  Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie© thirty-five feet long, weighting approximately 600 pounds.” – Ghostbusters

Is it wrong of me that I want this as a t-shirt?

When I was younger, I was reading the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.

In the book, the author related the story of how he was on the trading desk when news of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown hit.  His co-worker, a seasoned trader who’d seen it all, looked at Lewis and said two words:

“Buy wheat.”

The reason was simple.  Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s biggest supplier of wheat.  Now, radioactive wheat would have sounded cool in the 1950s.  Imagine the cereal ads:  New Atomic Pops™: NOW FORTIFIED WITH GAMMA RAYS!

The seasoned trader, however, knew there was going to be a shortage of wheat on the world market since the RDA of uranium isotopes has been decreased under the Make America Healthy Again agenda rolled out.

But Chernobyl happened.  The consequences?  One event, one domino, and the price of bread halfway around the planet starts twitching like a tall tweaker on Tang™.  That’s how fast these things move when the stakes are real.

I’ve moved on to nuclear jokes because most of the chemistry jokes argon.  What, no reaction?

In a more serious world where consequences were to be a thing that actually happened, I’d bet on a huge economic tidal wave incoming from the current Israel-America-Iran War.  Ten to twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply is stuck behind blockades.  To top it off, 14% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production is offline, and won’t be able to be repaired until 2029 or 2031.

Then, the Strait of Hormuz:  closing, re-opening, closing again like a game of “duck, duck, missile” has already tumbled a lot of dominos.

Right now, the Strait isn’t exactly a freeway.  Tankers are rerouting, insurance rates are through the roof, and every time someone blinks the flow sputters.  One day it’s open enough for a few supertankers to sneak through.  The next, it’s blocked again and prices expand like Madonna’s face after whatever it is she’s injecting into it.

Those first dominos are easy to spot, and they were the subject of a recent post.  Fertilizer production is down because natural gas is the key feedstock, so (domino falls) food prices are headed up.

Gasoline, jet fuel, and bunker fuel costs are up, so (domino falls) transport prices are up, too. Trucks, ships, planes, and everything that moves stuff from farm to factory to your grocery shelf gets more expensive.

Freight rates for everything from soybeans to sneakers start climbing.  Those are the obvious ones.

But dominos don’t stop at the first few if there are more in line.

I guess we know now who was holding the whole thing together.

Before the big inflation wave really crashes ashore, weird things start happening in the markets.  Gold is up on good news and down on bad news.  Same with silver.

Why?  Because these are assets (at least the paper versions that pretend to be gold and silver) that people can sell fast and clean to cover margin calls, and other ways that they’ve leveraged the market.  Each domino leads to other consequences.

What are the downstream consequences?  Political unrest?  Certainly.  We’ve seen it before.  We’re seeing it now.

When food prices spike, people in places that were already living on the edge don’t write polite letters to their congressman.  They take to the streets.  Empty bellies and expensive diesel have a way of turning into pitchforks and torches.

And what about a complete redo of the world economic stage?  Yeah, that’s a hell of a big Twinkie®, er domino.  But, it’s looking more likely every day.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night if you’re the kind of person who still believes in fairy tales about “the system.”  In a world where almost any country can convert whatever Christmas wrapping paper they crank out of their printing presses into any other currency almost instantly, why does the world need the dollar?

I’ve been asking this question forever on this blog.

I have absolute certainty that the dollar is the same as a cryptocoin made by Algerian, Albanian, or Albigensian pirates:  it’s a meme.  It’s just a meme that everyone has bought into for 100 years or so.  If I can dump the Zimbabwe Zloty straight into Seychelles Shekels, well, no need for dollars as the go-between as I trade my diseased goats for your rotten cocoanuts.

I heard that the Pharaoh’s favorite cook was Gordon Ramesses.

No need at all.

Marco Rubio even let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said that in the future the United States wouldn’t be able to put sanctions on countries anymore because other countries wouldn’t be using the dollar very much.

Now that’s a huge domino!

It was going to happen.  There was no way the world was going to forever let the United States print dollars forever and have people send us stuff like oil from the Orient or gold from Germany or PEZ® from Paraguay while we shipped them electronic representations of paper money that was now just too expensive for us to bother to print.

We’ve seen this domino before.

I later found out he had a trap door, so it was just a stage he was going through.

A nation that ceases to be a nation and starts to become a financial entity is toast.  One example was Spain.  They pulled in all that New World gold, let their economy wither, and offshored the real work to places like the Netherlands because they could not ditch the Dutch.  For a while it looked like Spaniards were on top of the world.  Then the Indians who gold ran out, and the bills came due.

The final nail in the coffin of Spain, which had been declining for hundreds of years?

When it ceased to be a military power that anyone noticed.  The Spanish-American War was that moment for Spain.  In the end, I think the Spanish were tired of being Spain since it was so much work, and were more than happy for Great Britain to take the helm.

But that was then.  Now Great Britian looks more like Spain circa 1870.

The Royal Navy has more admirals (40) than total warships (25) and only six plausibly active surface warships.  Guess that Britannia shan’t be ruling the waves of anything larger than a hot tub anytime soon.

Most of the time, nothing happens.

Markets drift.  Politicians talk.  Central bankers print and pretend.  Then that domino hits, and it happens all at once.

One day the system is humming along on just-in-time deliveries and faith in the reserve currency.  The next day the Strait is blocked for real, fertilizer plants shut down, grocery shelves get spotty, and suddenly everyone remembers that energy isn’t optional and cold showers suck.  Energy is the blood in the veins of the whole machine.

When the price jumps, everything else has to adjust:  wages, rents, retirement plans, and government budgets.

The dominos don’t ask permission.

The United States had to wait for COVID, but China got it right off the bat.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:  the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years.  Both of those props just got kicked.

Hard.  The reset isn’t coming in some distant future.  It has already started.

The only question is how many more dominos have to fall before everyone admits the board has been tipped and the Monopoly™ pieces are stuck in the Cheez-Whiz™ covered Rice Krispie® treats.

In the end, dominos don’t care.  They just fall.  One after another, faster and faster, until the structure is gone.  When the last domino drops, the only thing left is whatever you built that wasn’t made of paper and promises.

And sweet, nutritious, gamma rays!

Remember, Kim Jong Un and Dominos™ have a lot in common:  they can both make a crispy Hawaiian in less than thirty minutes.

Wilder Weekly News, War Edition

“Because I am good at three things:  fighting, screwing and reading the news.  Now, I’ve already done one of those today.  So, what’s the other one gonna be?” – Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Breaking news:  huge accident at the day care while playing peek-a-boo.  All were rushed to ICU. (all memes, clips as-found)

Even though it took longer than one of my usual posts, I thought I’d do another weekly news recap like I did last week.  The last one was fun.  This won’t be an all the time thing, but I’m going to continue it from time to time on Fridays.

Top Story

It’s war!  Or not.  No one can seem to figure out if it’s war.  Regardless, many Americans have mixed feelings, since approximately 80% of Americans don’t want war with Iran.  After really looking at the map, I can see the point of the 20% who want to bomb Iran into oblivion, send all of its citizens home, and cut it off from the Internet and international commerce.

Say what you want, I think this war has legs.  And yes, I know that a woman wasn’t in command, because if Trump asked a female commander where to bomb Iran for the greatest strategic impact, she would have said, “I don’t know, you choose.”

China has jumped out to positively indicate that in some cases that if the situation is right that they totally, completely support Iran in a moral sense if it’s okay with everyone else.

China had previously provided support to Iran, giving them a cunningly designed set of targets designed to look exactly like air defense missiles.

It turns out that Iran bought them at a discount, so at least they were a bargain.

Best Korea is waiting on the bench, still trying to get the coach’s eye so they can be sent in.

A United States Navy submarine put an Iranian frigate to the bottom of the ocean.  The Pentagon released the footage (below) and described the torpedo trajectory as one of the best attacks from ever, describing it as sub-optimal.  Iranians cried foul, since they felt it was unfair that the United States would sink one of their harmless warships that’s filled with guns and missiles.

Wall Street pundit Jim Cramer has invoked the Cramer effect and notes that this will be a short war.

Moving away from war, the United States shocked Canada by having learned how to play hockey for the first time since the Soviets were in charge, and won the gold medal.  Canadians were furious, and very upset at the loss and if we could speak Hindi we might be able to understand their pain.

India has plans to introduce an additional 60 million Indians to Canada, but the good news is that will only mean they need 17 apartments and two more toilets.

Thankfully, the GloboLeftElite and the ChamberCommerceElite have decided that everyone is a natural American and their policy was leaked on /pol/.

Great Britain has already adopted a variant of this policy.

And from the “How did The X-Files become a training video?” desk, we find that The X-Files was again a training video:

The moderation group of Black People Twitter, a Reddit© subreddit, got together for a meetup, showing that black culture has produced a great group of keyboard warriors!

And Gavin Newsom continued his outreach to black people, meeting a group of them for some blunts and purple drank prior to going out to shoot up a hookah bar.  From Gavin, “I just can’t wait to go shoot up some Juneteenth parties!”

In another shameful display of trans-hatred, a magazine posted the picture on the left instead of the actual picture of the stunning and brave trans-woman who was forced to swim with men instead of actual women.

And, Sydney Sweeney certainly was outclassed by a woman, Grugdra the Hungry, made entirely of adipose and Play-Doh® who showed Ms. Sweeney what a real woman was like.  You sure showed her, Grugdra!

In political news, EyePatch McCain was defeated in his primary race by someone who had not seen coming.

In other news, a woman voting for the Leopards Eating Faces Party was surprised when, in fact, a leopard ate her face.

Finally, a solution for one of the most vexing questions related to medically assisted suicide has been solved.  Who should decide if a person can end their life?  A.I.  Specifically, Tay®.

17 Hilarious Things To Think About On Friday

“That’s just morbid thinking.” – Return of the King

Women are not good at multitasking. Just tell one to sit down and shut up and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a numbered listpost of random thoughts, so here it is. I spiced it up with memes, so here are 17 things to think about on a Friday.

  1. The Universe is vast, and it’s certain that there is life out there on other planets, in fact I’ve predicted that we’ll find it in my life time. I’m not sure if there is intelligent life out there, but if there is, I am certain that aliens are not vegans because they would have contacted us to tell us about that already. Besides, if the government tells me that aliens are real, in 2026 I’ll immediately think they’re lying.

  1. The U.S.S. Gerald Ford was stationed with strike aircraft ready to attack Iran, and then their plumbing failed. To make repairs, they decided to stop off at the island of Crete, which makes this the first plumbing clog that has been fixed by adding Greece.

  1. Some are applauding that an American-born Hispanic is now the leader of the CJNG cartel. I say that’s colonialism and am holding out until they have a trans or gay cartel leader.

  1. Blacks are upset that a white guy said a word they don’t like at an awards ceremony. It is wonderful to see the oppressed multi-millionaire blacks responding to that oppressor man with Tourette’s syndrome with all the hate they can muster. Imagine if he had been dyslexic. He could have offended the redheads as well.

  1. India has ordered its citizens to leave Iran immediately, proving that Iran has some advantages. Thankfully, if India orders them out of the United States, we’ll only need one train. Shhhh, nobody tell them there is no rail service to India.

  1. The Andrew formerly known as Prince has proved that they even like to keep breeding close after railing his nephew’s wife (allegedly) before his nephew did, but it’s okay because she only did it for money back then. Did you hear about Meghan Markle’s tragic car accident? I think they have it planned for next month.

  1. Gavin Newsom told a black audience that since he’s dyslexic, just like them, he can’t read. But if you ask Harvey Weinstein, Gavin’s wife sure can breed. Gingers can’t be reached for comment, but Gavin was quoted as saying he sure was hungry for some fried chicken and watermelon.

  1. Cats have amazing self-esteem, nearly as high as a Millennial, though I’ve never seen a triggered cat in therapy for past trauma.

  1. What does a GloboLeftist ask his wife after sex? “Is he going to go home now, or did you want me to make you two breakfast?”

  1. I went on the DOJ website and when I wanted see one of the files, I got the creepy feeling that the DOJ is recruiting for Epstein.

  1. Everybody is an arch-villain in at least one other person’s story. Make it count, and ex-wives don’t count. I say go big: alienate your children.

  1. Kim Jong-Un is a pretty snappy dresser and probably has some pretty radical tattoo sleeves, but what happens when he starts to lift and take Ozempic®?

  1. I’m just waiting for the wave of GloboLeftist parents killed in the middle of the night by their children. Why? Because think of the real estate opportunities!

  1. 90% of the GloboLeft’s political agenda is a series of sexual fetishes pretending to be a political party. The other 10% is self-loathing and tears of impotent rage.

  1. Europe may be in the process of being invaded by violent Arabs and Africans and scheming Indians, but they sure can make bottle caps that don’t end up in the storm sewer.

  1. People wonder if we will be able to communicate one day with an alien species. Some wonder if we will be able to communicate with animals. Me? I just want the Indian telemarketers to stop calling my cell phone.

  1. Almost every problem existing in the world could be solved by sending people back to their home countries and by telling women “no” to most questions. Okay, technically that solves all the problems in Western countries and still leaves the third world as the third world. But when we tell the women, “no, that’s not our problem” then those problems will solve themselves. Or it won’t. But I wouldn’t know about it because we’ll have cut those countries off of the Internet.

2025 In Review: The Wilder Way

“You’re up for review.” – Fight Club

I wrote a review of why graphs should use wider lines.  It’s called, “The Plot Thickens”.

As an annual feature of Wilder, Wealthy and Wise, we poll our writers and editors and ask them to nominate the top stories of the year.  Since they are just me, it’s a far less complex process than you might imagine.  Here are the top stories of 2025:

January 2025

  1. Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th U.S. President.  Trump immediately issues executive orders on immigration, trade, and withdrawing from international agreements like the Paris Accord.  Alexandria Occasional-Cortex protests, “I didn’t even know the French could pronounce ‘Honda®’, I mean, wouldn’t it sound like ‘Onda?  So we should let them have an Accord®.  It’s a sensible car.”
  2. Wildfires ravage Greater Los Angeles, destroying over 13,000 structures, prompting evacuations and a state of emergency.  Governor Gavin “Reptile Smile” Newsom declares homeowners may rebuild that the land will be confiscated and given to people that buy him nice things.
  3. Bulgaria and Romania join the Schengen Area, lifting land border controls in Europe.  Bulgaria is still awaiting its first visitor and has the crepe paper decorations and everything along with party poppers and a 10% discount coupon to Bob’s Bulgarian Borscht, Baguette and Baklava Buffet®.
  4. Liechtenstein legalizes same-sex marriage, becoming the 37th country to do so, and demands to be known as Gay Liechtenstein.

February 2025

  1. Trump imposes 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and 10% on China, sparking retaliatory measures and trade tensions.  Trump then immediately lowers them, noting, “I shot the tariff, but I did not shoot the subsidy.”
  2. China retaliates with export controls and tariffs on U.S. imports amid escalating trade war, threatening to send more TEMU® products and advertisements if the U.S. does not relent.
  3. Canada wins the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off hockey tournament against the U.S.  Nic Cage and John Travolta are unavailable for comment.
  4. The Taliban visit Japan for first diplomatic engagement since 2021 as the Japanese noted they were no longer talibanned.

March 2025

  1. Trump pauses U.S. military aid to Ukraine after tensions with Zelensky when Zelensky wouldn’t eat his peas at dinner.
  2. Romanian protests erupt against election annulment, supporting the far-right one candidate who doesn’t Romanians replaced by Syrians.
  3. The Nagoya High Court in Japan rules non-recognition of same-sex marriage unconstitutional, primarily because of military pressure from Gay Liechtenstein.
  4. Trump increases tariffs on Chinese imports to 20%.  Or 60%.  Or 200%.  Can’t keep track.
  5. India launches missiles into Pakistan after a terrorist attack, escalating border tensions over regional fights against body hygiene, deodorant requirements, and who had first scamming rights over Oregon.

April 2025

  1. Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on imports from multiple countries, escalating global trade wars.  Or lowers them.  Or maybe doesn’t change anything at all.  I can’t remember.
  2. Pope Francis dies at 88 after mentioning he had inside information about Clinton crimes.
  3. China increases tariffs on U.S. exports to 84% in retaliation.  Or lowers them.
  4. South Korean President Win Won Soon impeached and removed and sent to Alabama to coach football.

May 2025

  1. Robert Prevost elected as Pope Leo XIV in the papal conclave, narrowly edging out Grammy®-nominated artist Taylor Swift.
  2. Germany’s AfD designated as extremist because it objects complete replacement of Germans by 2032, instead demanding it be put back to at least 2040.
  3. Japan allows bears in urban areas to be shot by hunters, as long as the bears are not gay, though the hunters can be gay and are encouraged to be vegan.

June 2025

  1. Protests erupt in Los Angeles over ICE deportations, leading to clashes and National Guard deployment and threats of military intervention from the Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein.
  2. The U.S. intervenes in the Israel-Iran conflict by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, which is less an intervention and more of a bombing.
  3. No Kings protests occur across U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Mexico against Stephen King, Larry King, King’s Hawaiian Rolls® and King Kong™.
  4. An Air India© flight crashes in Ahmedabad, killing 242, proving that Indians can manage to kill more Indians than Pakistan can.  Prime Minister Modi proclaims:  “India Global Superpower 2030!”

July 2025

  1. Republicans pass sweeping tax changes through reconciliation in U.S. Congress.  No one is sure what is in them but the lobbyists say that it’ll be great.
  2. The International Court of Justice® (Superman presiding) rules countries can sue over historical greenhouse gas emissions.  White Americans immediately sue the descendants of black slaves for greenhouse reparations, noting that if they really were the ones who built America, it’s time for them to pay up.

August 2025

  1. OpenAI® releases GPT-5™.  Sam Altman celebrates by sacrificing a small child, but the evil god he worships rejects it because, “It’s not really a sacrifice because he does it every Tuesday.”
  2. The Russia-U.S. summit at Joint Base Elmendorf in Anchorage focused on the Ukraine conflict, got nothing done, but did have a nice burger and a promise to meet up again “in a week or two, you know, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on”.
  3. Air Canada© flight attendants strike to ban requiring stewardesses to serve in-flight beverage service to Indians hanging on the wings.
  4. Anti-immigration rallies in Australia lead to clashes against the evil white people who are totally not being replaced by the hundreds of thousands of refugees brought in to replace them.

September 2025

  1. The French government collapses after no-confidence vote.  Again.
  2. The Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein demands the return of their gay crown jewels from France.  France protests, noting, “We’re not exactly sure where Liechtenstein is.”

October 2025

  1. In the U.K., Sarah Mullally becomes the first female Archbishop of Canterbury and immediately offers apology for all Christians resistance to moslem grooming gangs, noting, “It’s really white privilege to expect to not be sexually violated by short swarthy men with no upper body strength.”
  2. Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg abdicates as the Gay Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein attacks and begins to consolidate a European Homohegemony.

Why did Bing® A.I.® put Manson in the picture?

November 2025

  1. Canada’s measles-free status revoked.  Which is weird, because they had been measles-free since 1998.  Wonder how that could have happened?  No reason at all, I guess.  Odd coincidence that some of the highest measles rates in the world are in India.
  2. The Saskatchewan Roughriders win the Grey Cup.  Whoever and wherever they are, and whatever that it.

December 2025

  1. Trump’s economic approval hits a new low at 36%, but that only fills him with strength, and he decided to annex Antarctica and name it New Greenland.
  2. Sanae Takaichi becomes Japan’s first female prime minister, and immediately begins plotting to re-take Manchuria after tidying up a bit and doing some dishes.
  3. The Gay Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein cedes the Gay Presidency of Europe to The Trans Republic of Trans Transylvania.
  4. Thieves steal priceless jewelry from the Louvre in France, but after they’re caught and determined to be moslem, are then given a key so they can loot whenever they want.

What a year!

What did I miss?

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

“I had it all, even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections.” – Fight Club

I wonder if Sean Connery is in 00 Heaven?

As we approach the end of 2025, the U.S. economy resembles a science-fair volcano built on baking soda, hype, construction paper, speculation, bubblegum, vinegar, and greed.  I’ve written about this before, and, well, it’s so big it keeps dragging me back in.

The rot is birthed by several mothers:   cheap cash, the need to put it somewhere, and a new technology whose benefits are (at this point) opaque at best.  Let’s put down that you already know “money printer goes brrrrrrrr” so we’ll go back to A.I.

Again.

At the center of this precarious structure is what everyone who isn’t high on their own supply knows is an A.I. bubble.  Large numbers of people (including me) recognized the housing bubble for what it was, but it kept on going because momentum is one hell of a master.

Another case of car-pole-tunnel syndrome.

A.I. has inflated stock prices, diverted resources like a drunk wine aunt at Lululemon®, and now has spawned secondary bubbles in hardware and infrastructure.

I’ve touched on this in previous posts, noting how projected AI:

  • growth outpaces any reasonably available power supplies, present and near future,
  • revenue projections fall short of the grandiose promises, and
  • the full realization of AI’s (theoretical) potential could unleash economic distortions on a scale we’ve rarely seen in human history.

But bubbles don’t exist in isolation.  Bubbles multiply, feeding off each other until the inevitable pop unwinds it all.  When the Great Housing Bubble burst, for example, sales of sulfuric acid went to zero for months.  How are they related?  Turns out the Great Housing Bubble was fed off the same credit structure that paid for basic chemicals.

And for all this time I thought it was because sulfuric acid was just like anything Chuck Schumer says:  baseless and corrosive.

One time in chemistry they asked me to write 1,000 words on acid.  I couldn’t finish it because my pen turned into a giraffe and the paper melted.

Today, we’re seeing this play out in real time, with AI-driven demand ripping into consumer electronics and beyond, all while broader market indicators flash warning signs of decline.

The AI stock bubble has birthed an investment bubble in virtually all computer hardware. Demand for specialized components has skyrocketed, pulling supply away from consumer markets and inflating prices across the board.

  • RAM prices surged 172% year-over-year, with some guessing they’ll double in 2026,
  • SSD prices per TB are climbing with AI and cloud providers tightening supply chains.
  • Motherboards shortages are emerging as manufacturers prioritize AI server builds over consumer PCs, with one producer having sold out for 2026 already.

This shift isn’t just raising costs for gamers and everyday users; it’s distorting global supply chains, creating a feedback loop where AI hype justifies more investment, which in turn inflates hardware bubbles.

The statistics say cows kill more people than sharks, but I’m surprised that cows are killing any sharks.

What happens when the tide rolls out?  With the underlying economy already showing recessionary cracks, the fallout will almost certainly be severe.

Let’s start with the AI bubble itself:   valuations in the sector have soared, with companies like Nvidia™ and others commanding trillions in market cap based largely on future promises rather than current realities.  The S&P 500’s concentration in a handful of AI-related stocks reached 30% by late 2025, the highest in decades. Nvidia© (for example) doubled in price from April.

Doubled.

Skepticism is now mounting.

All this is unfolding against a backdrop of broader economic weakness that A.I. papered over.

Oil prices are declining despite ongoing disruptions from wars in Ukraine and tensions with Iran.  Price levels are back into COVID 2021 levels.  This drop persists amid supply risks: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries and U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan tankers should theoretically support prices, yet oversupply fears dominate.

My dad once asked me, “Son, if you have a hot blonde rubbing oil on a hot brunette, what do you get?”  I answered, “I don’t know, Pop.”  “Your camera, son, your camera.” (as found)

If peace breaks out in Ukraine, bringing Russian oil fully back online, prices could plummet 30%-50% as sanctions lift and exports surge.  Add in a resolution with Iran, and the glut could be historic—you might as well use oil for bubble baths.  The IEA already forecasts surpluses building into 2026.

This is a signal of weakening industrial activity worldwide, not resilience.

Domestic indicators paint a similar picture. Unemployment among native-born Americans ticked up to 4.7% in July 2025 from 4.5% a year prior, with the overall rate holding at 4.6% in November.

Wages? They’re stagnant at best.

The K-shaped economy persists:  high-wage earners see modest gains, but lower-income workers face stagnation, widening inequality.

So, what portends when the A.I. Bubble bursts?

History offers grim lessons: the Dotcom crash wiped out trillions and triggered a recession and the economic response to that caused he Great Recession.  An A.I. pop could be worse, given its entanglement with hardware and infrastructure.  It doesn’t help that it is spawned, in part, by the loose-money policies of the post-COVID world.  If I’m making an SAT question, Dotcom is to The Great Recession as COVID is to ___________.

  1. The A.I. Bubble
  2. A giant PEZ® dispenser filled with plutonium pellets
  3. Greta Thunberg
  4. The Black Studies Department at Harvard®

He then arrested me for assault with sandpaper.  He didn’t accept the excuse that I’d only roughed the guy up a bit.

Consequences of it popping?

  • Investment in data centers and chips dry up, leading to layoffs of all those H-1Bs in San Fran and cratering the tech manufacturing here and in many nations around the world.
  • Deflation hits: hardware prices would crash as overcapacity floods the market, but not before bankrupting suppliers who bet big on eternal demand.
  • Dogs and cats, living together.
  • With the economy already teetering: slow job growth, wage pressures, and oil signaling demand weakness, the rest are downstream consequences.
  • Consumer spending, which has propped up GDP, falters as confidence erodes and debt defaults rise.
  • Income inequality worsens because banks and Wall Street firms cannot be allowed to fail.

If this capital misallocation is as bad as some of the graphs I’ve seen, this will be the singular economic event of the lifetime of anyone alive.  There is a reason that I picked 2032 as the central pivot point of when Civil War 2.0 would show up and it was the underlying financial mismanagement of the United States.  A.I.?  It’s not the gasoline in the room, it’s the spark.

It would have been something.

I made this and even though I replaced it with a more fitting meme up above, I figured you’d want to see it.

In the end, bubbles always burst because they’re built out of illusions and fed by poor allocations of capital.  The A.I. frenzy has masked underlying frailties that would have led to a very major recession during Biden’s term, but the bubble continued to get bigger.

As oil slides, jobs stall, and hardware hype peaks, the reckoning looms.  And that science-fair volcano?  I hope I don’t drop it on my foot.

I’ll Krakatoa.

The usual.  Not investment advice, do your own research, etc., etc..  I’m not a priest or an exorcist though I played one on TV.  If you read this and make meaningful decisions based on it you need to take a step back and reconsider your life.